Streamline Publishing

for Kathleen Dunphy, painting outdoors was never really a choice — it was simply the place her two lifelong loves, the natural world and the animals in it, were bound to collide. A celebrated plein air and animal painter, Dunphy treats the two disciplines as entirely separate pursuits, yet both are rooted in the same conviction: nothing beats working from life. In this conver...

For nearly a century, one question has quietly obsessed art historians: who was Joshua Johnson?

It’s a strange mystery for an artist with some 80 surviving paintings. But Johnson left almost no trace of himself in his own work — only one of those 80 canvases bears his signature, and even that one is hidden, tucked into the pages of a book his sitter holds in her lap. F...

For days, rumors had been circulating about an injured wolf lingering near town. Sightings like that make people uneasy — and when a wild predator crosses into human spaces, the outcome is rarely good for the animal.

One evening, walking to my car, there he was, only a few feet away. Standing that close to a wolf reminds you exactly where you are in the order of things...

Standing on the cliffs at Otter Point, looking back at Mount Desert Island’s bold, iron-bound coastline, it’s easy to understand why 19th-century artists couldn’t stay away. Long before Acadia became a national park, it was a magnet for painters — and those painters, in turn, are largely responsible for the park existing at all.

In the mid-1800s, a new movement was tak...

Considered among the most important American paintings, Thomas Cole’s 1836 “The Oxbow” is a manifesto, not just of nineteenth-century American art but for the social role that American art can still play. 

England-born artist Thomas Cole (1801-1848) is considered the first great American landscape painter. His painting (above) titled “View from Mount Holyoke, No...